When I Use My Voice (Orange House by the Sea Residency)

A little Sunday afternoon improvisation pondering things about this and that…

Well specifically I’ve been pondering the voice, my voice, and my love-hate relationship with it. How, after being a singer-songwriter, when I started to make experimental music I actively avoided using my voice. Part of this was pragmatic: I didn’t yet know how to successfully do that live. Part strategic: of the few women doing experimental electronics at the time , there was a tendency to use voice—no disrespect intended as they they were doing amazing things—but I wanted to try to not easily be pushed into that category.

It has also always annoyed me that, certainly back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were basically only two touchstones to be compared to. If you used your head voice you were compared to Kate Bush, and if you let your voice crack, were trying to be Bjork. (Not that I am immodestly suggesting my warbles sound like any of these – Enya maybe?). It was an an easy shorthand that restricted the context for our own voices. While this was lazy it also indicated the gender imbalance of the pop world that basically allowed only a handful of women to be visible. It then relegated most of them to pop, the lighter weight, contemporary music form when compared to rock (Thompson, 2016).

So this is a little improvisation between an 0-coast drone, my live voice and my AI self who speaks texts. The AI texts are spoken and mixed live, that is, the looping is done though the manipulation of the text file (in Descript) rather than cutting up audio files in Live which means I “play” the text. I didn’t know it was going to go to this place when I started, which is the joy of improvising.

It is/I am a work in progress.

Orange House by the Sea Residency is courtesy of Chamber Made and the Estate of Margaret Cameron.

I acknowledge the tradition custodians of the land on which I am currently residing, the Boonwurrung Balag clan of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respect to elders past, present and those to come and offer my sincere gratitude to be able to experience the wonder of their country. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

orangehouseGP2023 · When I Use My Voice

Reference

Thompson, M. (2016). Feminised Noise and the ‘Dotted Line’ of Sonic Experimentalism. Contemporary Music Review, 35(1), 85–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176773

Research and Resurrection (Orange House by the Sea Residency)

Courtesy of Chamber Made and the Estate of Margaret Cameron.

After a 6-year hiatus, I’m re-vivifying the sound/s/words* blog to document the little residency I’m very grateful to be currently undertaking.

I am at Bobbinarring Point/Point Leo on the Mornington Peninsula, the land of the  Boonwurrung Balag clan, courtesy of the Orange House by the Sea Residency offered by Chamber Made and the late writer/director Margaret Cameron and her family. The residency is designed for a mid-career artist giving them time to reflect on their practice and conduct creative research without the pressure of a direct outcome.

While I am here, by the seaside, I’m taking time out from a year of rewardingly large projects and near obsessive grant writing to reflect on some things that have always troubled me in my practice: how does text, written and spoken operate in my work; and why, at 53, am I still so conflicted and confronted by the sound of my own voice.

I’ll get back to you on the answers to those…. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying acquainting myself with my macro lens and exploring the wonders of the ever rewritten shoreline.

* I have a terrible habit of reserving blog domain names and then spending too much time deciding on a template and by then I’ve run out of time to make content, so I’m forcing myself to use what I’ve got in some kind of digital thriftiness.

I acknowledge the tradition custodians of the land on which I am currently residing, the Boonwurrung Balag clan of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respect to elders past, present and those to come and offer my sincere gratitude to be able to experience the wonder of their country. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.